Warning: This article contains spoilers for a variety of movies.An online debate about wasteful movie endings has turned up several key titles, especially I Am Legend and Jurassic World Dominion. I Am Legend is notable for having an alternate ending where this is not the case, but the theatrical version ends with Will Smith’s character Robert Neville sacrificing himself to save two other post-apocalyptic survivors as well as the cure for the virus plaguing humanity. Jurassic World Dominion, on the other hand, follows humans and dinosaurs learning to coexist.
Recently, Reddit user w_paskee posted a thread asking for users to provide examples of movies with endings that made the entire experience feel like a waste of time. Overall, many users seemed to agree that the endings to 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion and 2007’s I Am Legend were among the most disappointing. However, other titles were also floated, including The Devil Inside and Wonder Woman. Check out select comments on wasteful endings below:
Feminist-Lobster:
[The Devil Inside] literally [sic] just ends with a link to a website that doesn’t exist anymore. So that’s probably the biggest waste of time.
ulqupt:
I Am Legend’s original theatrical ending. Had all this foreshadowing and hints at the true ending, and then they chickened out and changed it because of a dumb focus group.
Brad_Brace:
Skyline. I mean, the movie is a waste of time, but then the ending, or rather the credits scene, makes you go “you could have been doing that all this time! Why didn’t you do that!?”
immoValerkey:
Jurassic World Dominion. They open the movie clearly establishing that dinosaurs absolutely are a problem and they end it by saying “We will need to learn how to coexist!” And even show this insanely f—ing stupid shot of the giant aquatic dinosaur swimming next to a whale as if to show that “they coexist now!” When it’s obviously gonna eat the whale. No, we don’t need to learn how to coexist, we need to exterminate every single dinosaur with extreme prejudice. There can’t be THAT many of them since they can’t reproduce so fast. Not a single biologist in the world would look at that situation and say “oh yeah lets allow the dinosaurs to stay”, as they literally wreak havoc on every single ecosystem in the world.
hippie_dippie:
Wonder Woman. I literally yelled at the TV and ranted the entire rest of the night to my husband. Come to find out – THE STUDIO ASKED FOR THE ENDING TO BE REVISED and we were left with an terrible ending negating the entire premise of Wonder Woman.
Moveit77:
Glass. I saw the movie opening night, was really intrigued by the first two acts… only for the last act to be the most underwhelming cop out I’ve ever seen in a movie. I’ve never left a theater feeling more cheated.
Kangarou:
[Law Abiding Citizen.] “Oh boy, for a moment, I thought everybody was going to learn a valuable lesson about the flaws in the justice system. Good thing that didn’t happen!”
aoteoroa:
The Last Jedi. The First Order has developed a hyperspace tracking device. The resistance can’t escape them. Fin and Rose go on an hour long quest to a gambling planet to find a hacker who can disable the device. They don’t find the hacker. They do find Benicio Del Toro’s character who says he can help them…but then he double crosses the resistance. The whole hour long sequence searching for a hacker on the gambling planet could be deleted from the movie and have zero impact on the overall result in the movie. At the time I wondered if the purpose was to introduce Benicio Del Toro as a new villain … but his character is never even mentioned in the next movie.
Will Any Of These Disappointing Endings Ever Be Undone?
While a viewer’s appreciation of a story is subjective, many of the movies included on the list are widely recognized for having disappointing endings. One of the titles in particular, the 2012 found footage possession movie The Devil Inside, is notorious in this regard, as it cuts off in the middle of the action, telling audiences to visit a website to learn more. There hasn’t been word about a follow-up movie or a re-edit, so it seems unlikely that that particular disappointment will ever be properly resolved.
Likewise, some of the endings that were mentioned, including 2017’s Wonder Woman, have been cemented in by sequels that continue making them canon. However, others, like The Last Jedi, were reversed or ignored by their sequels. On top of this, there is a possibility that several of the other endings mentioned on the thread could be reversed or altered.
Sequels or alternate releases could very well help reshape the endings of some of these titles that do not yet have them, including Glass and Law Abiding Citizen (which does have a sequel in development). I Am Legend will join those ranks, as a sequel is in development that follows from the alternate ending. However, Jurassic World Dominion will not likely be one of them unless the franchise gets a full reboot, considering the worldwide implications of that movie’s ending.
